News

While a cottage industry has grown around providing services to optimize cloud usage and costs, large cloud providers themselves are beginning to promote their own optimization offerings. Microsoft recently purchased a cloud performance management company and made its product free to customers. Competitor AWS is aggressively promoting their own “Trusted Advisor” program with a free trial period.

Facebook has announced using HHVM, a HipHop VM with JIT compilation, in production, a solution that has unified their development and deployment environments, providing significant performance gains for developers.

In an email thread on Eclipse performance issues in Juno (Eclipse Platform 4.2) Eclipse silver sponsor Cloudsmith cofounder Thomas Hallgren has kicked off a flurry of dialog. Hallgren, an active committer on the Eclipse b3 project, says that after switching back from version 4.2 to version 3.8: "I was stunned by the performance improvement after the switch. The 3.8 platform is much MUCH faster"

Google has released PageSpeed Insights 2.0 with an interface redesign, extensions for Chrome and Firefox, automatic page optimizations with an online service or via SDK, an API, support for mobile devices and more analysis rules.

Azul Systems have today announced the release of jHiccup, an open source tool designed to measure the pauses and stalls (or "hiccups") associated with an application's underlying Java runtime platform.

Solutions Design has released ORM Profiler, a tool meant to help improve data access layer performance. It tracks and logs ADO.NET calls so that developers can analyze their data access and discover potential problems.

New Relic is bringing its well-regarded web application performance service to Java applications running on Heroku's PaaS. The add-on is offered in two versions, a free standard version, and a professional subscription service currently costing $0.06 per dyno hour. New Relic have also announced Python support for their stand-alone product.

The Unladen Swallow project that aims to speed up Python has proposed to be merged into mainstream Python. One of Unladen Swallow's goals was to remove the GIL; a new implementation of Python's GIL by Antoine Pitrou will be fairer and less intrusive on multicore CPUs. Also: Squeak Smalltalk has been ported to Android.

Clojure 1.1 RC1 is out and cuts the overhead of functional programming with a few new constructs: transients bring controlled mutability for persistent data structures; chunked sequences make lazy sequences more efficient. InfoQ takes a look at what makes these improvements work.

NewRelic just released RPM 2, the latest version of their performance monitoring software. RPM, which is available as SaaS (Software as a Service) now supports monitoring Java web/JEE applications as well as Ruby on Rails applications. We talked to NewRelic's Lew Cirne about the new release.